Too Many Drinks Later

Serena Cannon was forty-one years old, she sold medical devices for a living, and she had promised herself she would get through this wedding without making a scene. She made it eleven minutes.

The Driftwood Estate sat on the Oregon coast like it knew it was pretty. Reclaimed barn wood everywhere, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the sea, a ceremony lawn so green it looked painted on. She parked her rental among a row of Subarus and stood in the gravel for a second, smoothing the dress she'd bought specifically to look effortless. Effortless had cost her three hundred dollars.

Then she saw him.

Across the lawn, holding a champagne flute like it owed him money, stood Kirk Gunn. Forty-three years old. Pharmaceutical rep for the rival territory. And wearing a salmon suit. A full salmon suit, shoes included, the exact color of a grocery store fillet.

You have got to be kidding me, she thought.

She had dated Kirk for six months when she was twenty-three, both of them baby reps at their first corporate jobs. He ended it by ghosting her. No call, no text, just a man-shaped hole where her boyfriend used to be. Eighteen years later he was still winning territory from her and still hadn't said sorry, and she had kept a running mental ledger of both facts.

He spotted her. Of course he spotted her. He raised his glass about an inch, the international gesture of a man being smug at a distance.

A woman in a peach dress was passing hors d'oeuvres. Crab cakes. Serena took two, on principle, and walked directly into the line of fire.

"Serena." Kirk said her name like a man announcing a golf score. "You made it."

"Kirk. Interesting suit. I didn't know salmon came in formal."

"It's coral."

"It's the color of a discounted seafood case, and you know it."

He smiled down at her, which was annoying because he was barely taller than her and had to work for it. "You're here alone? I thought the great Serena Cannon didn't do anything alone."

"I'm here for Cherise, not for a date. Some of us can attend an event without needing an audience."

"Speaking of needing an audience," he said, and nodded toward a brunette near the archway, "I'm Heather's plus-one. Bridesmaid. Friend from my gym. Her ex is here and she wanted a decoy with a pulse."

Serena did the math and didn't like the total. Heather was the bridesmaid she'd met exactly once, at a caterer's tasting, and had spoken to for maybe four minutes total. "You're somebody's plus-one?"

"I'm somebody's plus-one," he agreed, taking a crab cake off her plate without asking, which was exactly the kind of thing he'd done at twenty-five too. "These are good."

"Get your own crabs."

"I plan to."

A hand landed on Serena's shoulder and she nearly swallowed a tooth. It was Lee, the bride's younger brother, twenty-eight, wedding coordinator for the day, wearing a headset and the expression of a man who had seen the guest list and made peace with God about it.

"Okay. I can feel you two fighting from the parking lot," Lee said. "The caterer can feel it. The crab cakes can feel it."

"We're not fighting," Serena said. "We're having a professional disagreement."

"You're standing nine feet apart and vibrating." Lee looked between them. "I met you both at that retreat last year. I know the whole thing. The territory thing. The... other thing."

"There is no other thing," they said, together, which was worse than anything either of them could have said alone.

Lee pressed his lips together like he was holding in a laugh that could get him disowned. "Well. Table six. Enjoy."

"Table six," Serena repeated. "Lee. Who else is at table six?"

"Table six is you and Kirk," Lee said. "And two of Cherise's college friends who think you're both fascinating, and an empty chair for Cherise's aunt who has food poisoning."

"You put the two of us at the same table. On purpose."

"I put you at the same table because table four is the in-laws and table seven is kids, so yes. On purpose." He adjusted his headset. "Also, if you two keep this up through the reception, I will personally seat you together at the singles table at Cherise's next wedding. She's thirty-three, there will be a next one."

He walked off toward a man holding a trellis wrong. Serena took a long breath of sea air and turned to tell Kirk exactly what she thought of this seating arrangement, but a string quartet had started up and ushers were waving people toward chairs, and the moment got eaten by the violin.

* * *

The ceremony was nice. She would admit that. Cherise cried, her groom cried, the wind off the Pacific kept lifting the veil like the ocean itself wanted a look. Serena clapped and got a little misty and did not think about the salmon-suited man seated twelve rows back on the other side, because she wasn't thinking about him at all, really, almost never.

Then came dinner, and table six.

The main hall was all warm wood and big windows gone purple with sunset. Serena found her seat card, put her clutch down, and Kirk pulled out the chair directly beside her and sat in it like he'd been assigned there by God.

"This is your fault somehow," she said.

"How is this my fault?"

"You have a way of being somewhere that makes it my problem."

"That's a compliment wrapped in an insult."

"It's an insult wrapped in an insult. Enjoy it."

The two college friends turned out to be named Ellie and Jess, and they were exactly the kind of women who smelled a story on the wind. Ellie asked what they did for work within ninety seconds, and when they both said the word "sales" at the same time, Jess set down her fork like she was settling in for a movie.

"Rival companies," Kirk added.

"Rival territories," Serena corrected.

"Same hospitals," Kirk said.

"Same hospitals," Serena admitted, "because he follows me around like a seagull with a quota."

The speeches started before she could land the follow-up. Cherise's father went first, long and sweet. Then the maid of honor, who cried, which set off a chain reaction. Serena found herself actually listening, and her champagne glass kept getting refilled by a waitress who moved fast, and somewhere in there Kirk's knee came to rest against hers under the table.

She should have moved it. That was the entire play, the obvious play, the play she'd have run in a second against anyone else. You move your knee, you take the territory back, you win. That was the game they'd been playing for eighteen years, across three conventions a year and a shared hospital circuit and one truly vicious dispute over a cardiology group in Tacoma.

She didn't move it.

She told herself it was because moving would be a reaction, and reactions were losing, and she was not losing at a wedding in a three-hundred-dollar dress. That was the reason. That was absolutely the reason, and not the fact that his knee was warm through the fabric and steady against hers while some uncle gave a toast about tractors.

"You're staring at the duck confit like it insulted you," Kirk murmured during the applause.

"I'm staring at my plate because I'm being polite, which is a concept."

"You're being stubborn, which is your concept." He turned his flute by the stem. "For what it's worth, the dress is nice."

"Don't."

"I'm saying a nice thing."

"You're running up the score on a technicality. It doesn't count if I can't leave the table."

"Everything counts, Serena. That's always been our problem."

She looked at him then, really looked, and it was a mistake, because under the salmon and the smugness there was the same face from the first corporate job, the one that used to bring her bad gas-station coffee at seven in the morning, and then the ghosting came back to her all at once like a bill arriving.

"You know what's always been our problem?" she said quietly, so Ellie and Jess couldn't hear. "You left. No phone call. Nothing. And then you showed up at my territory two years later acting like we were buddies."

Kirk's jaw worked. For one second he looked like he was going to say something real, and the maid of honor's speech ended and the whole hall clapped and the moment went under like a crab scuttling off a rock.

"Dessert's coming," he said instead.

"Great. Can't wait."

The knee stayed where it was. She let it.

* * *

The after-party moved to the sandbar around ten, which was when the bartender appeared.

She was a tall woman in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, working a portable bar that had no business being portable. Silver hair cut sharp at the jaw. Serena clocked her at the end of the night, because that's what you did when you'd been in sales long enough. You read people fast, and this woman read like a closed book propped open on purpose.

She watched a lot. That was the first thing Serena noticed. The second thing was that the fire pits had gone down to coals, and the tide was creeping up the sandbar in slow gray arms, and somehow the crowd had split into little islands of chairs and coolers, and the island she was standing on had Kirk on it, and Lee, and a cooler of wine that Lee had personally dragged out because he couldn't sit still for one minute of his sister's wedding.

"You two," Lee said, pointing a bottle at them. "I'm cutting off the drama. It's my sister's wedding weekend, and I'm rationing the drama."

"It's your sister's wedding weekend," Serena said.

"Same thing. I coordinated all the planning, I get all the stress."

Kirk tipped his beer at him. "For what it's worth, the venue's good. Whoever picked it has taste."

"I picked it," Lee said. "See, and you wonder why I invite you two to the same events. It's like feeding a zoo."

That was when the bartender came around the end of the bar with a tray and stopped in front of them.

"Good evening," she said. Her accent was faint and unplaceable, somewhere around Eastern Europe but worn smooth, like a stone in a pocket for years. "I am Svetlana. I run the bar here. You are the fighting couple."

"We're not a couple," Serena and Kirk said at the same time, which was its own kind of proof.

"So I see." Svetlana smiled like she'd been handed a menu. "Rematch drink? On me."

"We're not rematching anything either," Serena said.

"They rematch constantly," Lee said, setting down the bottle. "Eighteen years. I've watched it. It's the longest rivalry I know personally. I would pay money for tickets."

"You literally are paying," Kirk said. "The open bar."

"Then drink slower."

Serena scoffed at the whole setup, the tray, the smile, the word rematch, but Kirk took two glasses off the tray and handed her one, and she took it, because refusing a free champagne at a wedding was a principle nobody actually lived by. The wine was good. Annoyingly good.

Svetlana didn't leave. She leaned an elbow on the bar and looked at them both the way a nature documentary looks at meerkats.

"May I ask a question? Answer or don't, I am only curious. You fight like a married couple who never married. Is that accurate?"

"That's accurate," Lee said.

"Stay out of it," Serena said.

"Who won?" Svetlana asked. "The fight. The original one. Somebody left. Somebody got left. It is always like this, and one of you thinks they won and one of you knows they lost."

The fire pit popped. Somewhere down the beach a guy in a linen shirt was losing an argument about tide pools. Serena drank her wine and didn't answer, and Kirk didn't either, and Svetlana nodded like they'd both answered plenty.

"I have a game," she said. "A private challenge, just for the two of you, because you look like people who would rather win than have fun, and I find that very funny. You each get one round. In your round, I become whatever you claim you would prefer over this person. The perfect thing. The thing you say you want. Then we see whose desire is more honest."

"That's a weird sales pitch," Serena said.

"I am a bartender. Everything is a sales pitch." Svetlana spread her hands. "No tricks, no hypnosis, no harm. One shape at a time. You look, you talk, you tell me honestly if it does anything for you. If it doesn't, you say so and the round ends. Agreed?"

"And if you're some kind of con artist?" Serena said.

"Then you have been conned into a free drink on a beach, and what a tragedy." Svetlana looked at Kirk. "You already said yes in your head. I can tell. Salesmen say yes fastest."

"Guilty," Kirk said, and set his beer down. "Fine. Me first."

Serena opened her mouth to say absolutely not, no way, and then heard herself say, "This is stupid and I want to watch," and there went her whole evening.

* * *

Svetlana walked them to a driftwood bench a little ways from the fire, where the tide was close enough to hiss at the sand. She asked Kirk to describe it, whatever he claimed he'd prefer, and Kirk being Kirk, he gave a whole pitch about it first, like he was presenting to a hospital board.

"Calm," he said. "Somebody calm. Sharp, but calm. Reads the data before she argues. Doesn't turn every Tuesday into a hostage situation."

"He means me," Serena said.

"He means not you," Kirk said.

"Same thing in his mouth."

Svetlana rolled her shoulders once, the way a person does before lifting something heavy, and then she wasn't Svetlana. It happened fast, faster than a costume change had any right to be. Same white shirt, same bar behind her, but the face was different. Dark hair now, cut sharp, reading glasses she hadn't been wearing a second ago, a jawline like a spreadsheet. She was still tall. She was, Serena had to admit, exactly the kind of composed, put-together woman that Kirk described on bad nights at conventions when he'd had two Scotches and started monologuing about what he was looking for.